Classmates

I have really had a great time in English I this year. i know we had a bunch of papers, and projects, and couple annoying little assignments, but i know that you all know that it has exponentially helped us in growing as a good English student. It was a very big leap from 8th to 9th grade English.I know it was tough but we made it.


Our English class was a very energetic class. We made Dr.D from an English Teacher that never raised her voice to one who yells out ideas from poetry. That credit goes to lauren and MMQ though. Anyway, even though we lost MMQ, we still had a very fun year but i am glad that one year of English is out of the way.

Blog post for 5/14

In the fourth quarter, I think that i have come to class prepared every day. I don't really think that i can remember more than like two times where i have come to class not prepared. The Free Reading the first couple of times were the only general procedures that i had trouble with. I have checked my E-mail and the website daily, i have made sure of it. Overall i do think that i have retained a very positive, helpful,, and cooperative attitude throughout the fourth quarter.  The lectures in class, honestly, were not the most helpful things to me personally, solely because i think i have the attention span of a 8 year-old child. I hate it. I do think though that i contributed to them many times and they contributions were useful and they provided good discussion topics sometimes. I think that i could have been a better listener though.

My group work this quarter was awesome. I think that this quarter for some reason i really go t serious about all of the little grades. My individual work was good too. I really tried to pay attention to the little details so that i would be ready for the tests. I think that i have been a good member of the group in that i kept my group on task. I think ( as i said before,) that i have had a knack to pay more attention to the little grades and details, and it has really helped my development as a student and has certainly improved my grades.

I read 170 minutes of The Hunger Games and i read 68 pages of the book. I really am enjoying the Hunger Games  the second time around. You see, when i read a book, the only way that i can understand it is that i see it going on in my head so that i can analyze the story in my head. That is why i have such problem with Shakespeare because half the time i have no idea what the words on the page mean. But in the Hunger Games the first time o just could picture it so i stopped reading. After i saw the movie it was effortless to try and in vision what was going on, i just got it better.

 

This time i really understood what was going on. The beginning of the book was a little different from the movie but not much. In the beginning of the book its starts of with demonstrating how Katniss is the one who provides for the Family and it isn't easy. Having seen the movie i think that her perseverance and struggle to keep the Family going is the primary reason that she (spoiler alert) wins the games. 

Free Post

So I am really looking forward to the end of my freshman year, i am really excited just to get it over with. The reason that i am excited to get it over with is because i think that i am ready to become a sophomore and do the work that has come with it. I have really enjoyed this year, that includes all my classes. In each we had some pitfalls whether it be too much work, not enough time to do it, or just not liking the class, we have all had some good times.

The reason that i think that i am ready to be a sophomore is that i think that what makes you ready to be a sophomore is experiencing freshman year. What it does is that it gets you to respect being in High School. Freshman year was really fun, i met a bunch of new people and they have all been really great to be around this year.

Writing This Year + common errors list

Cole Kennedy

Dr. deGravelles

Block 4

4/30/12

                This year, I have written so much more than I expected. I thought that high school was going to be very easy, that was until I got about a month into Dr.D’s class. We wrote so many papers compared to previous years that it was ridiculous. But I thought that doing this really has helped me become a better writer and has helped me identify my problems I have in writing. I have learned that my main problem in writing is just conventions. Overall I think that I have improved very much over the year.

                Ninety-five percent of the time the feedback that I have received has been regarding conventions and other grammatical mistakes. So far, the ideas that I have written down have been fine and the reason that I have been missing points, I think is because the way that I put them on paper is incorrect. The conclusions that I can make from these different papers’ feedback are that I have a need to read my paper over several times just looking for grammatical mistakes and I need to read it out loud so that I can make sure that it makes sense. Another conclusion that I can make from the feedback that I have received is that I need to pay more attention to the details of what Dr.deGravelles teaches in class because the details are the main things that have been missing in my papers.

During the year on papers that I have had to write I have not had any problems with them being too short. An influential part of my grading on the Wrap was that it wasn’t long enough. The reason for this is because I had felt very cramped.   I hadn’t had time to really think my ideas through and develop them into fluently put together phrases that would result in me getting a higher mark. On the first day, I started off with prewriting. In 7^th grade I learned a skill that has still helped me today. Instead of just throwing down ideas I make a chart. With 2 boxes plus however many other topics you have each getting one box. You write down the main idea and then however many supporting details as you can and then it is much easier to write. I did this and it took up all of the first day.  The second day I wrote till we had to stop and I found myself leaving out pieces of information that wouldn’t matter all that much. So overall I think that timed essays don’t really work with me because I feel pressured and think that I need just cut my losses and move on. That is not a good plan.

My experience with writing over this year has progressively gotten better because with the writing of more than just two major papers in a year I have learned many things about myself as a writer. Over this year I have learned that I have no problem coming up with ideas or organization or sentence fluency, the thing I have a problem with is the punctuation, grammar, and conventions that are involved in actually getting these ideas into an organized document.  The way that I know this is that almost all of the feedback that I have received on my papers was about comma splices or wrong use of a semicolon or a misplaced comma. I swear if I had just read over all of my papers twice just correcting the grammatical mistakes my grade on all of them would have been so much higher. One of the main things that I learned is how lazy I am. How hard is it to read over a paper?

The feedback that I received surprised me honestly; I thought that the least of my worries was going to be conventions.  Turns out that convention should now be one of my main concerns. I do think that my feedback has matched my understanding of my work this year though. I think that it matched the most in the sense that ideas are not a problem for me. The only thing that is, is getting them down. The way that I evaluate my work is by how much time I spent on in and how much effort that I really put into it and no; it has not changed throughout the year.

 A goal that I want to achieve throughout this next year is that I want to have no more than three grammar problems on any given paper. Another is to not get lower than a B on any paper that I have in English next year.  A plan that I have to achieve these goals is that I am going to read each of my papers over three times before I finish writing it so that I can minimize the grammatical mistakes. For the B that I need on the papers I am going to make sure that I have developed my ideas completely and I am going to focus while writing the papers.

During the course of this year I have learned many things about writing and about myself as a writer. One of those things is that I am a very lazy writer. I need to make sure that I read and develop my paper before I turn it in so that I can get the highest mark that I can in English. One of the things that I have learned also that has helped me is that the details count. In response to this I am going to pay much more attention to the little details that come along with the class that helps you learn how to be a better literate person. I need to make sure that during class whenever the teacher is going over material that I am not I another world mentally. I need to make sure that I do not lose focus and that I only focus on what is going on in the class.

 Cole Kennedy

Dr.deGravelles

Block 4

4/26/12

Common Errors List

Missing Comma – Ex. When his parents asked him about his day, he just smiled and said “just an average day”.

Run-on- Ex.After they were brought back they were forced to work as a slave labor force, Haitian farmers thought of them as a cheap, effective slave labor that really do not know any better and really could not do anything about it unless they were fed salt or spices because if they taste salt or any kind of spice they would suddenly realize that they were dead and have a strong sensation that would make their bodies return to their graves and they could not become slaves again after that. Run-on sentence.

Comma Splice- Ex. He nods, a starting gun is shot with a loud “bang” his heart starts to race and then he cringes, he is feeling fatigue from lunch because he ate too much.

  

Misspelled- word- Rampageous- I spelled that word wrong

Quotation marks-   “Bu Bu Bu.”

Wrong page citing - . (56)

Word Choice- Global warming is a very bad thing and needs to be stopped.  

Repetition- There is also a spread of tropical disease that will be an issue also. 

Free Post

I listen to music all the time. There are a bunch of reasons why,i listen to music, most of the time it is because i need to focus on whatever i am doing. Other times i listen to music because i need to pass the time or go to sleep. Most of the time though i find myself listening to music because i am unconciosly trying to distract myself and not do my homework and i think that that has a big influence on my homework quality.

When i listen to music i think that it helps me focus because whenever i listen to music it kind of blocks out the rest of the noise around me and i would rather have noise that i like going on around me than having a whole bunch of noise that continuously surprises me an puts me off my train of thought. The only time that i restrict myself from listening to music when i'm doing my homework is whenever it is a reading assignment because if i listen to music then i can't focus on comprehending the words i can just read each individual word.

Free Post

I listen to music all the time. There are a bunch of reasons why,i listen to music, most of the time it is because i need to focus on whatever i am doing. Other times i listen to music because i need to pass the time or go to sleep. Most of the time though i find myself listening to music because i am unconciosly trying to distract myself and not do my homework and i think that that has a big influence on my homework quality.

When i listen to music i think that it helps me focus because whenever i listen to music it kind of blocks out the rest of the noise around me and i would rather have noise that i like going on around me than having a whole bunch of noise that continuously surprises me an puts me off my train of thought. The only time that i restrict myself from listening to music when i'm doing my homework is whenever it is a reading assignment because if i listen to music then i can't focus on comprehending the words i can just read each individual word.